“... Sailors tended to start their working lives young, even by 18th-century standards, and few of them took their formal education very far, but many if not most were literate, and not a few were self-educated. They read for pleasure, for profit and for self-improvement, since the ability to read, and especially to figure, opened up possibilities of ...”

“... sticks he was eating on his diet, so he closed the fridge door and went outside to the garage. He took his double-barrelled shotgun down from the shelf, took four shells from a box and put them in his bath-robe pocket. Then he walked back into the house, entered the bedroom of his old nanny, Mary, still holding the ...”

“... his sopranos, Shaw something little short of a compulsion to fall in love with, first, women who took singing lessons from his mother and then, after he turned dramatist, his actresses. This must be one of the hazards of creating works of art that need executants to perform them. Ordinary lovers are sometimes dismayed to find that their beloved is in effect ...”

“... Mr Johnson, as a young man, found it ‘unintelligible’. Now of course Mr Johnson in some sense took over from Mr Levin at what one is tempted to call the late London Times. He was a little worried, following on in this line: ‘Politics was my trade, not the universe.’ No doubt it was a diminuendo devoutly to be wished. Johnson is not indefatigable ...”

“... Romantic movement. Here and there – for example, at Oriel College – the younger dons led by John Henry Newman developed a pastoral conception of teaching very much in line with the later character-formation theory of liberal education adopted by the public schools and Oxbridge colleges. At both senior universities an extensive and important system of ...”

“... the stories were so smuttily school-boyish: in those days, saying rude words in front of nanny took a lot of nerve. Shit features quite a lot in Mortmere – as it does, curiously enough, in An Unmentionable Man. When samples of Mortmere reached Oxford, the court of Auden was spellbound. Stephen Spender later on recalled that ‘just as Auden seemed to us ...”

“... the way some also consider how this habit of dividing the work of a lifetime into distinct periods took hold. Stylistic and biographical conjectures along these lines were common in the 19th century, and they persisted in various forms until fairly recently. Then they came to be regarded as the product of a false consonance between art and the history of the ...”

“... required just under three minutes to make and, as Warhol usually projected them at a slower speed, took slightly longer to watch. At first, these static motion pictures were known around the Factory as ‘stillies’. Eventually, they would be called Screen Tests. In the first instalment of a two-volume catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s cinema, Callie ...”

“... and waving green branches – a symbol of grief, cleansing and continuity in Luo culture. It took several hours for the coffin to make the short journey to parliament, as thousands walked alongside the motorcade. The crowds were so large that the public viewing was moved to Kasarani Stadium. But the event quickly descended into chaos. People streamed ...”

“... First published in France in 1817, the princess’s prison journal was translated into English by John Wilson Croker in 1823. Croker noted that several passages are obscure, and one or two contradictory: there are frequent repetitions, and a general want of arrangement. All these, which would be defects in a regular history, increase the value of this ...”

“... wear his convict’s uniform once a year. In 1961, 90 years after Stead, a young man who took him as his hero was appointed editor of his old paper, the Northern Echo. At 33, Harold Evans wasn’t quite as precocious as his predecessor, but he came from a world in some ways closer to Stead’s than to England today. In the engaging early pages of My ...”

“... we do. And he caught fifty terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the fifty terrorists, and he took fifty men and he dipped fifty bullets in pigs’ blood – you heard that, right? He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had ...”

“... such as Bede in England and Snorri Sturluson in Iceland: it destroyed the gods’ temples or took them over, cut down the holy oaks and replaced them with crosses, and turned the gentry into patrons of churches and collectors of tithes. These campaigns had clear targets. The guerrilla warfare against people who put out food for the Good Folk, or who ...”

“... assured pastiches which his father transcribed in the Notenbuch. In January 1762, Leopold took Wolfgang, who was about to turn six, and Nannerl, who was 11, to Munich and then Vienna, where he showed them off to municipal bigwigs and royalty, often in exchange for large sums of cash. These extended tours, usually taken without his mother, Anna ...”

“... in trying to find the killer question that would somehow lead to Sturgeon’s resignation. They took evidence in the morning and took to social media in the afternoon. No one has come out of it well: not the committee members, or the obfuscating civil servants, or Salmond, who refused to apologise for his ...”